Quote:
Originally Posted by zerospinboson
I'm not really sure I agree, here. As I understand it, in the paper world, retailers get about 50% of the price. If hardcovers cost 25$, that leaves roughly 13$. Roughly 2$ are spent on every hardcover printed, with a chance that only part of all hcs will sell, and then I understand that the pbacks are also paid for with the money made through hc sales. All of these costs are up-front, and fairly substantial. This means that in a digital world, you need a substantially lower lump sum payment up-front. This would seem to add up to quite a bit, if you consider that this only matters for the riskiest books, and definitely make a dent in publishers' balance sheets. (Which are touted as the reason why they need to increase the prices on all other titles. Unless they're lying, of course.  )
Say the money saved here amounts to another 1-1.5$ off the average production price, (assuming no paper printed at all) then this adds up to 3-5$ saved. That's nearly 40% of their operating cost, so long as you assume no print runs at all!
Basically, if my silly maths hold water, I would suggest 'they' just try selling ebooks to ereader-owners first for titles they deem risky, and later decide whether to actually print the books and reach the larger market.
Anyway, WRT incorporating ebooks into the new book production chain: the money spent to create a mobi file from a word document should be trivial, yet will likely still result in less formatting issues than most re-digitized books suffer from. |
One thing I think you may be missing is that bestselling hardcovers don't just subsidize the paperback editions of the same titles, but also both paperback and hardcover editions of other titles.
I also don't think that ebook only versions to "test the waters" would lead to prices that are that much lower. In fact I think the reverse. Even if I accepted the idea that ebook sales are a "gimme" with no added cost to that of a paper edition and thus do not have to cover their share of the sunk costs from before the two editions fork, that would only apply if there was a paper edition. Without firm plans for a paper edition, the ebook would have to bear all those costs such as the author's advance, the cost of cover art, editing and everything else involved in acquisition.
Also, it's not quite as simple in a corporate environment to run a word doc through mobigen in order to create an ebook. There are multiple runs involved for different formats, and both DRM and software licensing costs to be covered (as well as the salaries of the people doing the conversion). These are all added costs that have to be covered somewhere.